So many books. So much procrastination. The books in the two above photos are most of the books I never got around to writing about. I love reading and I love thinking about what I am going to read next and I love chatting about books, but this year I just found writing about books "properly" was mostly more of a challenge than I was up for. I have an idea of how I want to approach blogging next year, which will mean writing about my reading but not necessarily writing reviews per se.
I still feel like I have neglected all these books this year. For me writing about the books I have read is part of the reading process, but in many cases I think too much time has passed and there are just too many to write about in any great detail. So this is going to be a long wrap up post--lots of books but briefly noted.
I wouldn't mind rereading Jhumpa Lahiri's In Other Words, which is about her experience learning Italian, immersing herself in the language and culture (I've long wanted to learn Italian, but there are no opportunities for learning it in a classroom setting where I live). She lives in Italy and now writes in Italian and translates Italian into English. This book is made up of short essays which she translated into English, so the essays sit side by side in each language.
Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was a great but sad read. Oscar has such an engaging voice and the storytelling is wonderful. The novel is broken into sections narrated by various family members, but following the trajectory you just know things are not going to end happily.
I think I want to read Rosamond Lehmann's Weather in the Streets in 2019, which is a sequel to Invitation to the Waltz. The story follows two sisters, the younger of which is preparing for her first dance. The setting is post-WWI England and the girls, though of middle class live in genteel poverty. A wonderful coming of age story, and very much what you expect from a Virago Modern Classic.
Helen Weinzweig's Basic Black with Pearls is a spy novel of sorts and like no other. A woman wandering the streets of Toronto looking for her lover in all the places of her youth. A curious novel, very internal, narrated in the heroine's mind and memories.
Meg Wolitzer's The Female Persuasion is very much a novel of the moment, topical and perfect for a book club discussion (I read it for the B&N Book Club). Feminist in tone, it is about the freshness of young women entering the world and beginning to question their place in it and older women who have been part of the struggle from the start and find that the world is not so simple and that rarely are issues black and white.
Vinegar Girl was my first Anne Tyler, though perhaps not her most typical novel as it is a retelling of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. A quick, fun and very entertaining story.
Ah, Miss Buncle's Book by DE Stevenson is a madcap rom-com of a story. I could picture the story as an old B&W film as events unrolled. Even if you have not already read it, you probably know the story--Miss Buncle uses her neighbors' lives as fodder for a novel (one must make money some way), but the lives of the characters' follows rather too closely to those of her friends (both good and bad aspects). Problems ensue. And so, too, does a little romance. Utterly delightful. Should I read one of her other books (maybe the sequel) next year?
I wish I would have written about Celeste Ng's Everything I Have Never Told You, though likely this is a book you have read, too. Reminiscent of The Lovely Bones, the story begins with the death of a high school student and works its way back to show the family dynamics and how they affected each member, particularly Lydia. The reader never gets to meet her in life, but only in death and through the memories of her family. As well and appealing to me the story reads like a mystery.
Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table was a prompt book. The cat's table is the one farthest away from the captain's. The story felt more like interlinked stories and follows the experience of an eleven-year-old boy as he travels alone from Colombo to England. I always enjoy stories told from the perspective a child, which are wise in many ways, maybe more honest in some ways than those told by jaded adults.
Another Anne Tyler novel, Clock Dance, which was another B&N book club selection. I have a feeling it is not her best novel, but I enjoyed it. The story of one woman's life, the story of a wife, who finds a second chance to redefine herself through a chance situation.
Several years ago I binge watched Prime Suspect with Helen Mirren. I have to read any of the books by Lynda LaPlante, but I did finally read Prime Suspect: 1973, which goes back to the early days and formative years as a young copper of Jane Tennison. The novel concerns two cases that Jane is working on, if only peripherally, but shows her skills and tenacity. I still need to watch the BBC adaptation of the book!
August is a Wicked Month by Edna O'Brien is one of her earlier novels published in 1965. It tells the sexual awakening of a woman who is separated from her husband and whose young son is vacationing with his father. She travels to the French Riviera where she experiences the excitement of romance without the entanglements of a relationship. Yet nothing comes without a cost she finds.
Peter Lovesey is great and I need to read more of his work. On the Edge is a standalone novel set just after WWII. Two former friends who were WWAFs run into each other in London and find that neither's lives are as exciting as they were in the war. Both are married, but unhappily so. They devise a plan to unload their husbands. This is a story filled more than one double cross. And a quite surprising ending.
I suspect I am in the minority here, but I did not get on well with Hank Green's An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. I think I am just not the right audience. It was felt as if it was written about and for Millennials. The story felt very thin and gimmicky, and it was a push for me to get to the end. I can safely say I will be able to skip the sequel.
Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is surely one of, if not the best, haunted house stories I have ever come across. It's the psychological terror of the house on Eleanor that causes all the chills. It was better the second time around than the first when I read it several years ago.
Lou Berney's November Road got a lot of press this year and on more than one occasion I have seen it called one of the year's best crime stories. I liked it a lot, but I wasn't exactly bowled over by it. It certainly had just the right versimilitude. Maybe it was the graphic nature of the book, the total disregard by the killer for his victims. Granted, it is a crime novel, but maybe just a little too much violence that happened front and center stage.
I really like Anthony Quinn and enjoyed Curtain Call immensely. Set in the 1930s it is a drama, a crime novel, a theatrical tale. There are many layers to the storytelling and they twine together nicely. It is the first of three novels where some of the characters' stories overlap. I am reading the second now and have the third on my TBR pile.
Light. Quirky. Unusual. Eye opening. Sayaka Murata's The Convenience Store Woman was great fun. This is a story with a most unusual heroine, and for that I think I like the story all the more. A woman who is looked down on, seen as something less than her peers, unacceptable who is almost willing to make a bad choice just to fit in. But this is a story where despite all the odds she triumphs. I loved it.
Another multilayered story is Kate Morton's The Clockmaker's Daughter. She does that parallel story-thing really really well. She also does the Victorian street urchin trope well. I liked the artist/archivist slant to the story. I think this is perhaps my favorite book by her. One small quibble, it was indeed lush and replete with description, with stories within the story, but I wouldn't have minded if it was edited down just a bit.
Alex Beer's The Second Rider is the first in a potential series of detective stories set in Post-WWI Vienna. Inspector Emmerich is one of the most unique detectives I have come across in a long time and for that, and the post-war austerity atmosphere thst Beer evokes so convincingly I will be watching for a second book. Emmerich is about as down-on-your-luck as they come. Practically indigent, he is addicted to painkillers and willing to risk all to find the truth. This is not the postcard Vienna you think you know.
I thought I would love William Boyd's Sweet Caress, which is not just the story of a woman's life, but of the twentieth century. Another prompt book, a novel I had been eager to read. I liked it, but I didn't love it. I had a hard time warming up to Amory. I could admire her photography, but not all the choices she made. The latter part of the book was more engaging than the first.
I did love, however, Celia Dale's Sheep's Clothing. It was a last minute read, a chance find, and I thought it was pitch perfect storytelling. Curiously I did not much like any/many of the characters in this story, but I found them and the situation so utterly fascinating that I could not put the book down. Two women have fraud down to a science. They convince the 'old dears' that they cultivate that they are with social services ready to return money to them . . . I plan on looking for all her books.
Brilliant. What a way to end the reading year. I finally have read the first of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, My Brilliant Friend. I know not everyone has gotten on well with Ferrante, but this was another pitch perfect read for me. The right book at the right moment. I did pick this up a year or so ago and knew it was not the right time to try and tackle it. There was no 'tackling' this time around. This is not a happy story, I admit, but there was a beauty to it in how real these girls and those in their community felt. There is a rawness to the emotions, as if you are looking in on something terribly private. I already have the second book on my pile.
Whew. Sorry about that. That was a lot of catching up, and I still skipped a few along the way. Next year will (hopefully) be different.